It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.
—WENDELL BERRY, “THE BODY AND THE EARTH” (1977)
What you’re looking at there,” says Nick Eldsen, “is people standing waist-deep in the medieval period.” I am with Eldsen, an archeologist with the Museum of London, in an office building that until recently looked down on one of the busiest streets in London, a block from Liverpool Street Station. But now this building looks down on an enormous pit—what will become an underground train station, and what was once a medieval burial ground. In other words, we are looking down into the past, and in a few minutes we will be there ourselves.
The site is a future station for Crossrail, an incredibly ambitious project to run a train east to west under the city. The project involves ten thousand workers, forty construction sites, and twenty-six miles of tunnels dug deep below London’s streets—and between, over, and around the network of pipes, tubes, and various utility lines already creating a complex maze beneath the city’s surface. This particular tunnel will run within two feet of the Underground’s Hammersmith and City Line, one foot under the Post Office Railway tunnel, and close under the Goswell Sewer, the second-largest sewer in the city. In the room behind us and on several floors above and below, hundreds of engineers and project managers stare into computer screens, huddle in conferences, and explain into phones, each with a bright orange construction site jacket hanging from their chair, back, or coatrack. I have donned the same orange coat plus orange overalls, rubber boots, an orange helmet, plastic glasses, and gloves. Wherever we go, there’s no doubt we will be seen.
A longtime archeologist for the museum, Eldsen has worked on dig sites all over the city. But the chance to peer into the ground under one of London’s busiest streets is a rare opportunity indeed, he says. The Crossrail project has created the “largest archeological dig in London for decades,” one that has yielded bones from reindeer, bison, and mammoths that date back nearly seventy thousand years, an eight-hundred-year-old section of ship, and the remains of Tudor houses. Among the spectacular finds on this particular site near Liverpool station are a graveyard populated by former residents of the Bedlam Hospital, with skeletons sometimes packed eight bodies per cubic meter, coffins laid “head to tail like sardines in a can,” Eldsen tells me, “and half a cat.”
“Half a cat?”
“Yeah. Also, there was a little girl that had been buried with beads. And a woman with a plate, a seventeenth-century Delft blue-and-white, buried upside down on her chest, probably her favorite.” As I am imagining this woman with her plate lying buried for nearly four hundred years just a few feet below the surface, Eldsen says, “Millions of people must have gone walking through here on Liverpool Street, a busy road leading up to a mainline station, and not had any inkling what was underneath.”
It’s these skeletons that have “a bit of personality” to them that make an archeologist’s curiosity come alive, Eldsen explains. “I spent years on a medieval site by the Tower of London where we found Roman burials with the heads cut off, and we don’t know why.” In another dig, archeologists discovered a medieval school where under the hallway floor they found a wooden shoebox, and in it a (whole) cat, wrapped in a shroud, perhaps by Tudor law students sometime between 1400 and 1600. Eldsen admits that such finds are rare, but “every now and then you do get something that allows you to get a view of a little event going on.”
That is certainly true at the site we visit now. Having come down into the street to stride past busy Londoners in our swishy orange pants and awkwardly fitting hard hats, we descend by aluminum ladder into the actual pit. The first five meters hold most of the archeological finds, Eldsen says. Once you get past about ten meters down, there is no more evidence of the human. (And think of that! All this time on Earth, even here in one of the most intensely lived-in locations on the planet, and our history is only thirty feet deep. “You go down deep enough and the human story ends?” I ask another archeologist. “The party’s over,” he says with a nod. “We call it subsoil.”) Around me an archeology team is digging carefully and brushing dirt from ruins. A defunct nineteenth-century brick sewer pipe runs nearby, filled with concrete so the surrounding work won’t collapse it. A few feet away sit several large clear plastic bags full of bones. Eldsen reaches into the closest and pulls out an enormous piece, which he nonchalantly identifies as a cow’s jawbone. “It’s all really just cooking waste,” he says.
Before the archeologists can dig back into the past, says Eldsen, the construction team must cut through the modern street surface, a process that sometimes can be quite loud. “I swear that I can hear the opening rhythm of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ from these things when they’re going full tilt,” Eldsen says of the street-cutting machines. Sometimes the process will uncover the stone “setts,” or cobblestones, of a Victorian road surface, but most often they find the first layers of rubble and dirt that were laid down between phases of building from the Roman period to the present day. The archeologists rely on careful machine sifting, a process that stops whenever some more significant features start to turn up, such as the walls of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century building poking up through the Victorian layers sealing them. At that point the full archeological team jumps into action, cleaning up by hand with mattock, shovel, and towel, before they start the systematic process of recording and removing each relic in turn.
Here on Liverpool Street what has especially inspired Eldsen and his colleagues is the discovery of sixteenth-century burial grounds. Just a “football-pitch-sized piece of ground” holds more than two hundred years of burials and more than twenty thousand skeletons packed tightly together. Eldsen and his colleagues are eager to find out what killed them. “If this isn’t plague, it’s smallpox or another epidemic. Most people died fairly quickly, and so that doesn’t impact the bones. What you get is what they lived with—signs of rickets, bowed legs. There was one poor lady who had syphilis that had eaten into her bones. Lots of bones that had broken and not healed straight. So there’s an amazing amount of information in here.”
An amazing amount of information, agreed. And maybe it’s knowing that so many have lived, died, and been buried near this spot. Or maybe it’s the image of the skeleton holding her plate just a few feet below the sidewalk. But for me, peering into the past with Eldsen gets me thinking about the relationship between the ground and our health. It’s a relationship, it turns out, as intimate as they come.
My first stop after meeting Eldsen is to lunch with Dr. Graham Rook. I have wanted to speak with Rook ever since discovering his “Old Friends” hypothesis—that our living in urban areas, separated from the microbiota in the natural ground, is having serious consequences for our health, and especially for our children’s health. While an ever-increasing number of studies have built the case that living closer to “green space” is beneficial, Rook’s work identified one of the direct reasons why. I find him jovial and friendly, with an amused take on the world.
“We now know that our immune systems, when we’re born, are like a computer with a hard disk but no data, and without data it doesn’t function,” he tells me in a cafeteria near his office. The most important thing is that the data teaches it to regulate itself, he explains, because the immune system is extremely dangerous. If it turns on you, it will kill you. And, in fact, in modern cities we are developing more of the disorders in which the immune system is not correctly regulated. For example, we have more diseases like multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system is attacking our own tissues. And we have more people with inflammatory bowel diseases, where the immune system is attacking the vast numbers of organisms in our gut. Counterintuitively, these attacks don’t occur in developing countries, or they are very rare. So, Rook argues, we need to have the input in the immune system in order for it to not attack the things it shouldn’t be attacking. “What we’re getting in the rich countries, especially in urban populations, is increasing incidences of all these diseases. It’s not the only reason why we get these conditions, but it is the major contributing factor.”
By way of example, Rook tells me about a pediatric epidemiologist named Erika von Mutius who investigated asthma in East Germany after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Assuming that there would be massive levels of asthma because of all the industrial pollution, she was surprised to find very low levels. “We now know that pollution and tobacco smoke don’t cause the asthma, they trigger the symptoms of people who have it. Who are the people who’ll have it? Well, they are people who don’t have their immune system correctly regulated.”
Another example? “Hay fever started to be noticed in the early nineteenth century. A chap called John Bostock, an Englishman, in 1914 he got very excited about it. He traveled all around England looking for cases. He found about twenty cases, having, he said, scoured the whole of England. I bet you I could find forty cases in here today,” Rook says, scanning the crowded room. “Something has changed.”
The bottom line for Rook is that “if you meet the microorganisms that are present in a cowshed in the first two years of life, or if your mother meets them while she is carrying you as a baby, then you are less likely to have allergic disorders, you are less likely to have inflammatory bowel diseases in childhood. And you’re almost certainly less likely to develop psychiatric disorders as an adult as well.” Researchers in Finland, he says, have found similar results.
“The only good thing Stalin did—from an epidemiological point of view—was when he invaded Karelia,” Rook explains. Ever since, Karelia has been divided between Finland and Russia. While the Finns live in well-insulated houses and have a high incidence of autoimmune diseases, such as Type 1 diabetes and childhood allergies, the Russian Karelians are still practically living in mud huts and have very few of these disorders. Finnish researchers have compared the microbiota in the house dust in the Finnish houses and the Russian houses and found them to be completely different. In the Russian houses there are lots of animal-derived strains, lots of environmental strains, “lots of things wafting in from the soil and the environment,” Rook adds. The Finns called the connection between microbiota and human health the “biodiversity hypothesis.”
Whether we call it the Old Friends hypothesis or the biodiversity hypothesis, mounting evidence suggests that our obsession with hygiene and “cleanliness” in the West, and our associated aversion to dirt, is having unhealthy results. Rook says this aversion to dirt is a misunderstanding of the human place within nature. “People tend to assume that humans are some kind of plastic spaceman that arrived here and has nothing to do with this biosphere,” he says. “Of course that is complete nonsense. We are a part of the biosphere, and we are ourselves an organism that overlaps with and interacts with the ecosystem.”
The notion that the human body is separate from the natural world is an old one, and it has warped our thinking throughout the ages. For example, says Rook, “People had always assumed that your lungs are sterile, which, when you think about it, only the medical profession would be quite so stupid. They are our core connection to the outside world. We’re a bloody great tube,” he says, laughing. Rook explains that “there’s all sorts of stuff in the airway, and there needs to be.” In fact, the number of organisms in the air is stunning, he says, and the complexity of the microbiota of the air is almost as complex as that of the soil. Most of it is in the form of particles, which will then be picked up by the cilia (“the little hairy things that wave inside the airways,” he explains), balled up, and then swallowed. Indeed, most of what we breathe in will ultimately end up in our gut.
Is Rook saying we have lost contact with the soil and that is having these effects? “I’m saying we’ve lost contact with the green environment. I regard soil as very much a part of that. Because most of the organisms that are wafting around in the breeze—I love that word, ‘waft’—are in fact organisms from the soil.”
Have we really lost contact with the green environment? It may not seem so. After all, many of us can see trees and grass out the window, perhaps a squirrel or some kind of bird. But when I think about the last time my bare hands actually grasped fistfuls of soil, or the last time my bare feet felt the natural ground—a sandy beach, pine needles in the forest, a front yard’s fresh-cut grass—I think, Yes indeed, these experiences are becoming more rare. That word “contact” is key. The “state or condition of physical touching,” says Merriam-Webster, and I think again of Henry David Thoreau on Maine’s Mount Katahdin, climbing the mountainside alone in mist and fog, feeling like the first person on this part of Earth—and then feeling his connection to physical ground.
It’s easy to imagine Thoreau grasping at his chest, his arms, his face—feeling a human body that is like the body of the solid earth, in fact a part of it, not separate from it. In Walden, he asks, “Am I not part vegetable mold myself?” That we are part of the natural world, part “vegetable mold” ourselves, is among Thoreau’s many radical insights, and perhaps the most challenging to our modern senses.
A rapidly increasing number of studies explore the implications of this connection for our physical, mental, and even spiritual health. While direct causation between exposure to nature and improved human health is sometimes difficult to prove, associations between the two are not. In fact, again and again, reports indicate that “the balance of evidence indicates conclusively that knowing and experiencing nature makes us generally happier, healthier people.”
Some may say, Well, of course. Or, Why would we need scientific studies to verify what everyone knows is true? Unfortunately, in cities around the world, more and more of us are living without the opportunity to experience nature. And, remarkably, even in Western industrialized nations like ours, it is especially true for children.
Probably no one in recent memory has more successfully raised awareness about this problem than Richard Louv, who called attention to what he called “nature-deficit disorder.” He wrote,
Some startling facts: By the 1990s the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970. Today, average eight-year-olds are better able to identify cartoon characters than native species, such as beetles and oak trees, in their own community. The rate at which doctors prescribe antidepressants to children has doubled in the last five years, and recent studies show that too much computer use spells trouble for the developing mind. Nature-deficit disorder is not a medical condition; it is a description of the human costs of alienation from nature.
One striking manifestation of this change was the fact that in 2008 the publishers of the Oxford Junior Dictionary replaced dozens of nature-related words with more tech-oriented words. This action struck so many people as too impossible to be true that the fact-checking website Snopes.com investigated. Their verdict? It was true: the dictionary had been “systematically… stripped (of) many words associated with nature and the countryside.” The publisher defended itself by arguing that the omitted words no longer hold relevance for modern-day childhood, and that they had only so much space (“little hands must be able to handle it”). In 2015, a group of writers led by Margaret Atwood asked for reinstatement of the words, citing the unraveling of the bond between nature and culture “to the detriment of society, culture, and the natural environment,” but to no avail. Among the words removed: acorn, dandelion, fern, heron, lark, otter, pasture, and willow.
The word-stripping may seem less startling when we consider the actual amount of time children spend in nature these days. Recent studies report that American children have “on average only four to seven minutes of unstructured outdoor play per day.” And, American children spend “more than 30 hours per week connected to electronic devices, but less than an hour a month in nature.” Said one study, “Children are in some ways on house arrest.” Another described today’s kids as “the backseat generation” whose “experience of nature most often occurs from the inside of an automobile.” Yet another report reminds me of Luis Zambrano’s daughter in Mexico City: “82 percent of mothers with children between the ages of 3 and 12 cited crime and safety concerns as one of the primary reasons they do not allow their children to play outdoors.” The last phrase of this sentence might sound like a typo: “do not allow their children to play outdoors.” But in fact, today’s children spend less time playing outside than any generation before them.
We might be most troubled by the lack of contact with nature for our children, but anyone living in an urban area does so with less natural diversity than did preceding generations. “It is likely,” one study reports, “that most of Earth’s urban human population lives in biological poverty. In cities all over the world, there are fewer kinds of birds, flowers, insects, and other wildlife, as well as simply less of it overall.” In fact, the authors argue, this holds true for “cities diverse in age, size, location, and surrounding habitats.” And not surprisingly, the most severely affected are poorer and disadvantaged communities. Two examples: In 2013, the Washington Post found that “wealthier areas of the District of Colombia had an 81% average tree-cover rating, while lower-income areas averaged only 48% coverage.” Another study found that “land cover was associated with segregation by racial and ethnic minorities. A problem that… raises serious issues of environmental justice.”
In 1984, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson coined a word to describe what he saw as an instinctual human need for contact with nature: “biophilia,” meaning “love of life and living systems,” or, as Wilson put it, “the connections that humans subconsciously seek with the rest of life.” Wilson argued that biophilia is a biological need essential to optimal health, and his writing (“the brain of the fly… resembles a grain of sugar”; “every species is a magic well”) is brimming with it. “To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion,” he wrote, “our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises in its currents.” Thirty years later the scientist would write of how our destruction of the world’s biodiversity was leading us into the “Eremocene,” the Age of Loneliness.
Study after study has supported this hypothesis, linking contact with nature to long- and short-term mental and physical health. A recent Danish review of academic studies found direct health benefits that “included psychological wellbeing, reduced obesity, reduced stress, self-perceived health, reduced headache, better mental health… reduced cardiovascular symptoms and reduced mortality from respiratory disorders.”
Those of us living in urban areas have a much higher risk for anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses than those who don’t. At the same time, more of us than ever before in history spend our lives indoors and on concrete, literally separated from the natural ground, and spend less time than ever before in contact with natural green spaces.
If we suffer as we remove ourselves from nature and we prosper as we are reconnected to nature, it makes sense to ask why we continue to live as we do. Why we continue to pave our cities so completely. Why we undervalue open space. Why we allow the type of development that reduces our contact with nature. Especially when, as one researcher argues, “If we had a medication that did this—a medication that prolonged life, that addressed very different unconnected causes of disease, that did it at no cost and with no side effects—that would be the best medication of the decade. But we don’t have a medication like that except for this ‘vitamin N’—nature.”
Unfortunately, says Canadian neuroscientist Colin Ellard, “Historically, the attitude toward the importance of green space has been basically to consider the presence of greenery as an esthetic nicety, rather than as something of fundamental importance to people’s psychological state.” Even now, the ever-increasing scientific evidence about how nature affects our health is only sporadically finding its way into our policy decisions, especially in terms of land use. As one recent report found, “Probably the one area where rapid progress could be made is improving communication and collaboration between land-use and city planners, (and) people involved in public health.”
There’s something else going on here too. A major hindrance to our stemming the tide of pavement rising across our lands is that it’s often easier to see the immediate monetary benefits of such development than it is the longer-term negatives. My host at a recent astronomy talk complained of a new development that would “almost completely surround (his) observatory with light,” but in the same breath acknowledged, “I have to admit that I’m for it, a position that may reflect my age—twenty-nine—and a desire for a robust economy during the majority of my career.” It’s probably far harder to see the costs of a “robust” economy—and by this, we most often mean an economy of endless growth—because they don’t immediately impact us. If the loss of natural spaces—and our resulting loss of contact with them—often doesn’t seem to have an immediate effect on us, how can we begin to truly recognize or quantify that loss?
That’s a question Graeme Willis and Emma Marrington at the Campaign to Protect Rural England try to answer every day. On a foggy London morning, I visit the CPRE offices on a winding backstreet in South London. Graeme and Emma welcome me warmly and share the ways CPRE is trying to protect what they see as a resource as vital to the country as any other, the actual countryside.
Created in 1926, CPRE has long had as its mission the goal of shaping development in England so that the national heritage of “a beautiful and thriving countryside that’s valued and enjoyed by everyone” can be preserved. The group has had considerable success, helping to create several national parks and influencing planning laws on local, regional, and national scales. Recent campaigns include those designed to protect England’s historic hedgerows, slow the expansion of roads and housing developments, and limit the damage created by new fracking operations. But the heart of their work remains raising awareness that the English countryside is under constant threat of reckless development.
For Graeme and Emma, the idea of our separation from natural ground hits close to home. During the 1990s, they tell me, CPRE often used the phrase “concreting over the countryside” as a way to capture attention in the popular press. Even now, Emma says, “our current president, Sir Andrew Motion, who’s the former poet laureate here in England, talks a lot about ‘drooling concrete’ over the countryside.” Already the most densely populated country in Europe, England continues to see a steady spread of pavement. To help the public understand what’s being lost, CPRE found a word that captures a quality they want to protect, and then they made a map of that quality. A map of tranquility.
Tranquility, according to CPRE, “reflects the degree to which human beings experience the environment unhindered by disruptive noise, movement, and artificial lighting and structures.” The quality of tranquility is, they say, “one of the countryside’s greatest gifts to us all.” The map, which colors the country from deep green (“most tranquil”) to deep red (“least tranquil”), with lighter green, yellow, and lighter red between, makes its point immediately—only a few areas of deepest green remain, mostly in the north, while the deepest red of urban areas spreads along roads and highways like a spider’s web to nearly every area of the coast.
CPRE created the map by using information about the presence or absence of wildlife, open spaces, and natural landscapes, or roads, buildings, and lights—the paved world we know well. In fact, the areas that are the deepest red are the places where most people live. The map, Emma explains, is “a way of identifying, measuring, and mapping tranquility so that it can be integrated fully into public policy decisions.” It’s something the government has been slow to do. As official CPRE policy explains, “The overwhelming tendency over the last 30 years has been to fragment and obliterate tranquil places and reduce this quality where it is still present.”
A big part of the problem is that, faced with new roads, buildings, and lights, qualities that contribute to tranquility such as quiet, darkness, and calm “are easily overwhelmed by the scale and power of such intrusions.” These intrusions can start small and spread slowly, and by the time we realize what’s been lost, it’s too late. The result—many now argue—is that the developed world is home to more and more people who are sick in spirit, more and more people suffering from stress and mental illness.
But the map isn’t simply about pointing out the reddest areas. This map, like Eric Sanderson’s The Last of the Wild, is also about helping people see the tranquil areas that are left and trying to, as Emma says, “reconnect people with their local countryside.” It’s a countryside with which increasing numbers of Britons have lost touch—a fact of modern life that is different from just a generation or two ago. “Growing up, I was always out, getting muddy, rambling, so to me that was normal,” Emma says. “Whereas a lot of kids nowadays don’t have that sort of experience.”
Says Graeme, “Something we’ve got to get to grips with is the notion that our best interests are served maintaining that severance, whereas actually they’re best served by realizing we are in nature, we’re of nature, it’s in us.” It can be hard to realize this in a world in which our needs are constantly being anticipated and catered to with new products. As Graeme puts it, “Somebody could say, ‘Hey, we can make a lot of money producing a virtual-reality headset that takes people into a tranquil environment.’ And to be fair, if you need to get away from it all, putting a headset on for an hour might actually do the job in some way. But the assumption would be that that’s doing the whole job.… We might know that seeing natural environments and seeing landscape and hearing birds is what does it for us, but it might also be all these things combined.”
I am struck by the way the CPRE’s map of tranquility is in some respects a map of roads. In fact, especially when talking of paved roads, it’s hard to overstate their effect on the planet. The ease of transport roads provide is a central pillar of our society. But when we follow our roads, we bring along that society with us, and oftentimes the not-so-tranquil aspects of ourselves.
Near the end of my visit to the Crossrail dig with Nick Eldsen, we got down to where, as he put it, “we get the Roman stuff going on.” He was speaking of Londinium, the Roman city that existed here between about AD 43 and 400. Together we looked at what he called “a nice Roman road coming through,” something he and his colleagues had figured out after finding quite a lot of Roman horseshoes. “They didn’t work very well,” he explained, “so there’s a lot of them from this area, and we’ve actually got them in the wheel ruts in the road. And if you can imagine—we’re certain there must have been a little bridge here—some carter struggling with his horse to get up the ramp to the bridge. And the horse loses his shoe in the mud, and it provides a nice little snapshot of Roman everyday working life.”
In Britain, the Romans built one of their most extensive road networks, with routes that major highways follow today. The United Kingdom is also where paving technology developed fourteen centuries later, in the 1800s, technology that soon sprawled out around the world, paving the wild straight to our very front doors.